from the great bytes for all list - also probably the
guardian or someother lefty rag
b
--- satish jha <sjha {AT} vsnl.com> wrote: > To:
peoplesindia {AT} yahoogroups.com,
> bytesforall_readers {AT} yahoogroups.com
> From: satish jha <sjha {AT} vsnl.com>
> Date: Tue, 25 May 2004 06:10:45 -0700 (PDT)
> Subject: [bytesforall_readers] Chandrababu Naidu,
> Consulting Firm McKinsey, Britain, Vision
>
> Subject: Chandrababu Naidu, Consulting Firm
> McKinsey,
> Britain, Vision 2020 & Formula 1
> From article 'This Is What We Paid For'
>
> by Britisher George Monbiot in OutlookIndia.com.
>
> Chandrababu Naidu, the state's chief minister, was the West's favourite
> Indian. Tony Blair and Bill Clinton both visited him in Hyderabad, the state
> capital. Time magazine named him South Asian of the Year; the governor of
> Illinois created a Naidu Day in his honour, and the British government and
> the World Bank flooded his state with money. They loved him because he did
> what he was told.
>
> Naidu realised that to sustain power he must surrender it. He knew that as
> long as he gave the global powers what they wanted, he would receive the
> money and stature which count for so much in Indian politics. So instead of
> devising his own programme, he handed the job to the US consultancy company
> McKinsey.
>
> McKinsey's scheme, "Vision 2020", is one of those documents whose summary
> says one thing and whose contents quite another.
>
> (1) It begins, for example, by insisting that education and healthcare must
> be made available to everyone. Only later do you discover that the state's
> hospitals and universities are to be privatised and funded by "user charges".
>
> (2) It extols small businesses but, way beyond the point at which most people
> stop reading, reveals that it intends to "eliminate" the laws which defend
> them,
>
> (3) and replace small investors, who "lack motivation", with "large
> corporations".
>
> (4) It claims it will "generate employment" in the countryside, and goes on
> to insist that over 20 million people should be thrown off the land.
>
> (5) Put all these - and the other proposals for privatisation, deregulation
> and the shrinking of the state - together, and you see that McKinsey has
> unwittingly developed a blueprint for mass starvation. You dispossess 20
> million farmers from the land just as the state is reducing the number of its
> employees and foreign corporations are "rationalising" the rest of the
> workforce, and you end up with millions without work or state support. "The
> State's people," McKinsey warns, "will need to be enlightened about the
> benefits of change."
>
> (6) McKinsey's vision was not confined to Naidu's government. Once he had
> implemented these policies, Andhra Pradesh "should seize opportunities to
> lead other states in such reform, becoming, in the process, the benchmark
> state."
>
> (7) Foreign donors would pay for the experiment, then seek to persuade other
> parts of the developing world to follow Naidu's example.
>
> There is something familiar about all this, and McKinsey have been kind
> enough to jog our memories. Vision 2020 contains 11 glowing references to
> Chile's experiment in the 1980s. General Pinochet handed the economic
> management of his country to a group of neoliberal economists known as the
> Chicago Boys. They privatised social provision, tore up the laws protecting
> workers and the environment and handed the economy to multinational
> companies. The result was a bonanza for big business, and a staggering growth
> in debt, unemployment, homelessness and malnutrition.
>
> (8) The plan was funded by the United States in the hope that it could be
> rolled out around the world.
>
> Pinochet's understudy was bankrolled by Britain. In July 2001 Clare Short,
> then secretary of state for development, finally admitted to parliament that,
> despite numerous official denials, Britain was funding Vision 2020.
>
> (9) Blair's government has financed the state's economic reform programme,
> its privatisation of the power sector and its "centre for good governance"
> (which means as little governance as possible).
>
>
> (10) Our taxes also fund the "implementation secretariat" for the state's
> privatisation programme. The secretariat is run, at Britain's insistence, by
> the far-right business lobby group the Adam Smith Institute.
>
> (11) The money for all this comes out of Britain's foreign aid budget. It is
> not hard to see why Blair's government is doing this. As Stephen Byers
> revealed when he was secretary of state for trade and industry, "the UK
> Government has designated India as one of the UK's 15 campaign markets."
>
> (12) The campaign is to expand the opportunities for British capital. The
> people of Andhra Pradesh know what this means: they call it "the return of
> the East India Company". This isn't the only aspect of British history which
> is being repeated in Andhra Pradesh. There's something uncanny about the way
> in which the scandals that surrounded Tony Blair during his first term in
> office are recurring there. Bernie Ecclestone, the Formula 1 boss who gave
> Labour pounds1 million and later received an exemption from the ban on
> tobacco advertising, was negotiating with Naidu to bring his sport to
> Hyderabad. I have been shown the leaked minutes of a state cabinet meeting on
> January 10th this year.
>
> (13) McKinsey, they reveal, instructed the cabinet that Hyderabad should be a
> "world class futuristic city with Formula 1 as a core component." To make it
> viable, however, there would be a "state support requirement of Rs400-600
> crs"(4 billion to 6 billion rupees).
>
> (14) This means a state subsidy for Formula 1 of pounds50million to pounds75m
> a year. It is worth noting that thousands of people in Andhra Pradesh now die
> of malnutrition-related diseases because Naidu had previously cut the subsidy
> for food. Then the minutes become even more interesting. Ecclestone's Formula
> 1, they note, should be exempted from the Indian ban on tobacco advertising.
> Mr Naidu had already "addressed the PM as well as the Health Minister in this
> regard" and was hoping to enact "state legislation creating an exemption to
> the Act".
>
> (15) The Hinduja brothers, the businessmen facing criminal charges in India
> who were given British passports after Peter Mandelson intervened on their
> behalf, have also been sniffing round Vision 2020. Another set of leaked
> minutes I have obtained shows that in 1999 their representatives held a
> secret meeting in London with the Indian attorney-general and the British
> government's export credit guarantee department, to help them obtain the
> backing required to build a power station under Naidu's privatisation
> programme.
>
> (16) When the attorney-general began lobbying the Indian government on their
> behalf, this caused yet another Hinduja scandal. The results of the programme
> we (the British) have been funding are plain to see. During the hungry
> season, hundreds of thousands of people in Andhra Pradesh are now kept alive
> on gruel supplied by charities.
>
> (17) Last year hundreds of children died in an encephalitis outbreak because
> of the shortage of state-run hospitals.
>
> (18) The state government's own figures suggest that 77% of the population
> has fallen below the poverty line.
>
> (19) The measurement criteria are not consistent, but this appears to be a
> massive rise. In 1993 there was one bus a week taking migrant workers from a
> depot in Andhra Pradesh to Mumbai. Today there are 34.
>
> (20) The dispossessed must reduce themselves to the transplanted coolies of
> Blair's new empire. Luckily, democracy still functions in India. In 1999,
> Naidu's party won 29 seats, leaving Congress with five. Last week those
> results were precisely reversed. We can't yet vote Tony Blair out of office
> in Britain, but in Andhra Pradesh they have done the job on our behalf.
>
>
> www.monbiot.com
>
> References:
>
> 1. Vision 2020
> 2. Vision 2020, Page 96.
> 3. Vision 2020, page 42.
> 4. Vision 2020, page 195.
> 5. Vision 2020, page 170. This is worded as follows: "However, agriculture's
> share of employment will actually reduce, from the current 70 per cent [of
> the population of 76 million] to 40-45 per cent".
> 6. Vision 2020, page 158.
> 7. Vision 2020, page 333.
> 8. The figures have been tabulated by Tom Huppi in the document Chile: the
> Laboratory Test, which can be found here.
> 9. Clare Short, 20th July 2001. Parliamentary answer to Alan Simpson MP.
> Hansard Column 475W.
> 10. The full list can be read here.
> 11. Government of Andhra Pradesh, ?2002. Strategy Paper on Public Sector
> Reform and Privatisation of State Owned Enterprises.
> 12. Department of Trade and Industry, 6th January 2000. Byers to Help UK
> SMEs Foster Export Links with India. Press release.
> 13. Government of Andhra Pradesh. Minutes of Cabinet sub-committee
> meeting on 10th January 2004.
> 14. ibid.
> 15. ibid.
> 16. Clifford Chance solicitors, 3rd June 1999. Vizag - Meeting with the
> Attorney-General. Fax transmission.
> 17. Eg P. Sainath, 15th June 2003. The politics of free lunches. The
> Hindu.
> 18. Eg K.G. Kannabiran and K. Balagopal, 14th December 2003. Governance
> & Police impunity in Andhra Pradesh: World Bank urged not to make loan.
> Peoples' Union for Civil Liberties and Human Rights Forum, Andhra
> Pradesh.
> 19. Government of Andhra Pradesh. Draft Report of the Rural Poverty
> Reduction Task Force. Cited in D. Bandyopadhyay, March 17th 2001. Andhra
> Pradesh: Looking Beyond Vision 2020. Economic and Political Weekly.
> 20. P Sainath, June 2003. The Bus to Mumbai.
>
> =====
> ________________
> satish jha
> www.dpindia.org
> www.jamesmartin.co.in
> c: 202 368 2688
> c-in: 98913 79191
<...>
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=====
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